I'd seen lots of films by all these directors, but until I started looking at their work systematically last fall, and reading a few books, I never had a good sense of what exactly makes their films distinctive. I've always had a good sense of what a Fellini film is like, or a Truffaut film, or an Igmar Bergman film, but I never had the same sort of sense of what a Scorsese film is, or an Altman film, or an Orson Welles film.

What's interesting is the way different directors are distinctive for different reasons. When one thinks about ``style'' in Scorsese, it has to do with the camera work. The Scorsese camera is always moving, doing extreme close-ups, high angles, low angles. There's a movie called New York Stories that has short films by Scorsese, Coppola, and Woody Allen. The Scorsese segment, called Life Lessons is, I think, one of his best works. But what's really striking, once you watch NEW York Stories more than once, is the way the Coppola segment and Woody Allen part are completely boring visually once you've seen the Scorsese segment (which comes first). Coppola and Allen just plant the camera on a tripod somewhere and let it roll.

Altman also likes to use interesting camera work, especially zoom shots and reverse zoom shots, but what's really interesting in a lot of Altman films, Robert Phillip Kolker points out, is the way the movie is bigger than the movie screen. The movie spills out over the edges, and one is aware that there are things happening off-screen, including voices from people who are off-screen.

Stanley Kubrick is exactly the opposite in this respect. Kubrick's films take place in a definitely defined space, like the stage of a theatre. There's no life that extends beyond what's on the screen. When I first started looking back at Kubrick's films, after studying Scorsese and Altman, I couldn't see anything that seemed to define a really distinctive style. Kubrick's camera work in particular is very ordinary. (Lots of tracking shots, especially reverse tracking shots, but done in a very routine way.) Kollker points out in particular that one of the things that characterizes Kubrick's films is a sense of detachment. The viewer is always watching from outside; the doesn't enter into the film and become part of it and identify with the characters. But, aside from that, for quite a while I couldn't figure out what made Kubrick a notable director. It seemed to me that the only thing that really distinguishes his films is the choice of sensationalist subject matter, as in Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining.

But then I decided to look at two films I definitely didn't want to watch: A Clockwork Orange, which I think I saw when it first came out and saw once again in 16 mm at a campus film series, and Full Metal Jacket, which I avoided seeing when it first came out and have never wanted to see, because everyone says it's so violent.

Watching A Clockwork Orange again, first of all I noticed that the violence in it is not really all that bad, certainly mild in comparison to a Quentin Tarrentino film. Almost no blood. What there is, though, which bothers me more than violence would, is an intense sense of violation. Even so, though, these scenes of violation really occupy only a small part of the film.

Visually, nobody could possibly say that A Clockwork Orange is routine. it's dramatically striking. And to a lesser extent, the same is true of Full Metal Jacket. And this made me realize that almost of Kubrick's films have this striking visual impact. Certainly that's the thing above all that made 2001 such a remarkable film, and Barry Lyndon is, of course, utterly beautiful (more of a museum piece than an entertainment, critics complained).

So that made me think of the two different ways of making a film visually interesting. You can take fairly routine, but ordinary subject matter and have the camera look at it in interesting ways, as Scorsese does and Altman often does. Or you can take extremely interesting subject matter and film it pretty much straight on, which is what Kubrick does and what Altman does in Cookie's Fortune (although Altman's camera work is never completely straightforward). The Coen Brothers do a mixture of both.

Also, I realized that it's a little misleading to say that the viewer looks at a Kubrick film from a detached point of view. This is wrong, at least for A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket, if one interprets ``detached'' as meaning unemotional. Certainly in Clockwork orange one feels strong emotions about the film, even though one doesn't identify with any of the characters. (One of the things that makes the film so disturbing, in fact, is that it does almost force the viewer to identify with Alex (Malcolm McDowell), who also does the voice-over narration, and yet one constantly fights against this identification because Alex is so totally repulsive.)

The point is, though (as Kollker point outs) that in Kubrick's movies the viewer stays outside the film and watches from the outside. Whereas in Scorsese's movies the viewer jumps right into the middle of the action. If one looks at the beginning of almost any of Scorsese's films, for instance Taxi Driver (but not Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More and probably not New York New York), you see that from the very beginning, the camera is not a neutral observer but is showing something that's filtered throught a consciousness. Not necessarily the consciousness of one of the characters in the film, because the camera often shows us things and perspectives on things that no character in the film would be capable of seeing. But it's as if the camera becomes a consciousness that jumps right into the film, moves around to look at things closely, steps back to get perspective, moves way up to the ceiling or down to the floor, but never looks in a neutral, objective way. The camera is always reacting emotionally to what it sees.

The other thing that Kollker points out is the relationship of the characters and the action in the film to the space those characters inhabit. And here, it seemed to me that the distinction was very much like what Hugh Kenner describes in a very good very short book on Flaubert, Joyce, and Becket. Flaubert starts by describing a room, describing a world, describing the characters in that world from an objective point of view. In cinematic language, Flaubert starts out with ``establishing shots,'' then afterwards moves on to close-ups and two-shots. This is pretty much what one gets in Dickens or Tolstoi or almost any novelist prior to the 20th Century. (Jane Austen's establishing shows tend to portray the social landscape rather than the physical landscape.)

This is the Kubrick approach, although Kubrick never does use very many close-ups. So Kubrick's approach is quite traditional, except that most directors, once they've got the cinematic setting well established, move in close so that the audience can become immersed in the film, and Kubrick doesn't do this. (To some extent he does in parts of Full Metal Jacket, especially in the first part of the film which takes place in the Marine training camp on Paris Island. Incidentally, the violence in Full Metal Jacket, which I'd heard so much about, is only a very small part of the film, and is extremely mild compared to Saving Private Ryan. For me, anyway, the most powerful emotional impact was the sense of violation one gets in the beginning, in the Paris Island training camp.)

Joyce's Ulysses (to get back to Hugh Kenner's book) is the opposite of Flaubert in that everything comes to us through a consciousness --- either Leopold Bloom's or Stephen Dedalus's for the most part. We learn about the external world the character inhabits by a process of accretion of one little detail at a time, as the character interacts with those details, until after a while one has an accumulation of details actually much richer than what Flaubert gives, but all seen through the eyes (and felt through the hands, and heard through the ears) of the point-of-view character. This process of accretion is the Scorsese approach, although, as I mentioned, Scorsese doesn't restrict himself to showing us the view through the eyes of a character in the film. But he does build up his world one detail at a time.